UX Australia 2011

Ben Kraal

Ben Kraal is a Research Fellow with the People and Systems Lab in the School of Design at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He specialises in research about how people make use of technology in their lives.

Ben’s research is currently focussed on investigating passenger experience in airports and understanding how doctors make use of stethoscopes. More generally, he’s been developing new ways to understand how expertise is demonstrated in physical activities. Ben has also done work on developing and extending scenario techniques to design for speech recognition interfaces. In his PhD research he applied concepts from Actor-Network Theory to understand how users make speech recognition software useful on a daily basis. Ben is a member of the Design Research Society and recently co-chaired a workshop on Ethnographic Fiction and Speculative Design and co-chaired the OZCHI 2010 technical program.